Country: USA

The global health community faces a deepening challenge — not only from infectious diseases but also
from a pandemic of misinformation, argues VCP founder, Heidi J. Larson.

Listen to the CommonHealth Podcast by VCP partner The Centre for Strategic & International Studies to learn more about the Vaccine Integrity Project (VIP) – a new initiative spearheading responses to vaccine-related actions taken by the second Trump administration.

This study aimed to identify drivers of HPV vaccine hesitancy and effective public health interventions to increase HPV vaccination rates in two U.S. states (New York and Florida). The findings provide insights into the impact of demographics, state policies, and vaccine confidence on HPV vaccination.

CIDRAP releases interim update on its Vaccine Integrity Project, spotlighting global threats to vaccine confidence and outlining next steps to support equitable immunization efforts worldwide.

“A lot of people had no clue how toxic the [vaccine misinformation] environment was,” says Heidi Larson, who studies vaccine hesitancy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “People who were taking vaccines for granted got exposed [to misinformation], and now there’s no turning back.”

In the oil towns of west Texas, a measles outbreak is spreading. Gaines County, where the flare-up began, had the state’s third-highest share of children exempt from measles and other vaccines for religious or philosophical reasons last year

The way to discuss a vaccine, says Prof. Heidi Larson, founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, is to ask your patient how they feel about it and go from there, addressing patient concerns and developing a risk-benefit analysis to discuss.

Professor Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project explains how “medical injustices leave distrust not only in individual memories but community memories.”

The latest WHO/UNICEF estimates of national childhood immunisation coverage have revealed the largest declines in routine immunisation uptake globally in three decades. Through a large-scale retrospective modelling study, we investigate the extent to which vaccine confidence has changed globally using pre- and post-pandemic.

The State of the World’s Children 2023 was developed in collaboration with VCP and using Vaccine Confidence Index data. It reveals that public perception of the importance of vaccines for children declined during the COVID-19 pandemic in 52 out of 55 countries studied.

The annual Health And… conference is designed to advance health equity. VCP Founder and Co-Director Professor Heidi. J Larson is one of an esteemed panel of speakers.

Our third study of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among 23,000 respondents in 23 countries, surveyed from 29 June to 10 July 2022 found willingness to accept vaccination at 79.1%, up 5.2% from June 2021.